St Paul's Cross

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Coordinates: 51°30′51″N 0°05′52″W / 51.5142°N 0.0978°W / 51.5142; -0.0978
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A sermon preached from Paul's Cross (in the lower-left corner) in 1614 (note the cathedral's central tower is missing its spire, lost after a fire in 1561).

Paul's Cross (alternative spellings – "Powles Crosse") was a preaching cross and open-air pulpit in St Paul's Churchyard, the grounds of Old St Paul's Cathedral, City of London. It was the most important public pulpit in Tudor and early Stuart England, and many of the most important statements on the political and religious changes brought by the Reformation were made public from here. The pulpit stood in 'the Cross yard', the open space on the north-east side of St Paul's Churchyard, adjacent to the row of buildings that would become the home of London's publishing and book-selling trade.[1]

A monumental memorial column called "Paul's Cross" with a golden statue of St Paul stands in this area of the Cathedral precinct since the early 20th century, but it is not on the exact spot where Paul's Cross stood. A stone carved with the words 'Here stood Paul's Cross' marks the actual location of the pulpit as it stood from 1449 until 1635, when it was taken down during Inigo Jones' renovation work.

History

Pre-15th century

The eastern half of the Cross churchyard had been controlled by the Corporation in the Middle Ages: it was the site of the London '

Archbishop of Canterbury and the King attended the next such meeting we know of, in 1259, at which Londoners came to swear their allegiance to the latter and to his heirs (though under duress, as a royal army was holding the city gates at this time). They also gathered here later to swear allegiance to Henry's opponent Simon de Montfort
.

A Richard Walker from

Archbishop of Canterbury, throwing various examples of his own heretical writings into a fire. Thomas Netter
also preached against Lollardy here.

Jane Shore, mistress of King Edward IV was brought before the cross in 1483 and divested "of all her splendour".

On Sunday 22 June 1483, a Cambridge Doctor of Theology, Ralph Shaa, was commissioned to preach a sermon from St Paul's Cross, in which he set forth Richard, Duke of Gloucester's claim to be King of England. This was a key stage in the process of Richard III usurping the throne of his nephew Edward V, one of the Princes in the Tower.[3]

15th century

Bishop Thomas Kempe rebuilt the cross in 1449 in grand architectural form, as an open-air pulpit of mostly timber with room for three or four inside it, set on stone steps with a lead-covered roof and an ambulatory around it.[4] This ambulatory would be closed in with a low wall in the early seventeenth-century. In all, the pulpit building formed an octagon about thirty-seven feet in diameter.[5]

Open-air preaching at St Paul's Cross

16th century

"John Bradford Appeasing the Riot at St Paul's Cross," from a later edition of 1563's Foxe's Book of Martyrs illustrated by Kronheim. According to Foxe, Mr. Bourne, a Catholic bishop and speaker, had nearly driven his Protestant listeners to riot, but Bradford came to his rescue and calmed the mob.[6]

For much of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, sermons were preached here on a weekly basis all year round. The preachers were appointed by the bishops of London. For important events or at politically sensitive times, senior clerics (including deans and bishops) would be called on to preach; on less important Sundays, the bishop and his chaplains looked to newly ordained preachers from Oxford and Cambridge, or to local London preachers, to fill the rota. Early in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, it was sometimes difficult to find preachers willing to undertake a two-hour sermon at Paul's Cross.

Lord Mayor ordered the door to be forced. In the early years of Elizabeth's reign, Paul's Cross was one of the most important means of popularising the Elizabethan Settlement. On 15 June 1559, John Jewel preached his famous 'Challenge' sermon (which he would repeat on 26 November that year), in which he promised to convert to Roman Catholicism if his opponents could show evidence for specific Catholic teachings and practices from the first six hundred years after Christ. The so-called 'Challenge Controversy' started by this sermon led to ninety-six publications by 1570.[10] There was also preaching against the Puritan Movement in 1572, in response to the Admonition Controversy, and anti-puritan preaching became more common after 1589 when Richard Bancroft launched an attack on puritan activism in a sermon preached 9 February 1588.[11] During the Essex Rebellion, the Earl timed his arrival in London so that he and his followers arrived at St Paul's just before the end of the Paul's Cross sermon, in the hope of gaining the support of the London aldermen.[12]

Audience

References to Paul's Cross sermons in contemporary diaries and other texts suggest that the sermons were popular in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James VI and I but that they declined in popularity in the 1630s, particularly after 1635 when they moved into the relatively confined space of the Cathedral choir. One Elizabethan guide to learning French, Claudius Hollybrand's The French Schoolmaster (1573) describes a visit to the Paul's Cross sermons and reports that members of the court and senior clerics might be seen there. Attendance by the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London and their wives was far more common than the nobility, however. The guildsmen also attended Paul's Cross sermons, often sitting together formally in their guilds for special occasions like the Accession Day sermon. Attendance at the Paul's Cross sermons became an important means for the corporation to make their civic rituals compatible with Protestant teachings in the years after the Reformation.[13]

The end of Paul's Cross

William Dugdale claimed that the pulpit cross was destroyed under the Ordinance for 'Removing monuments of Idolatry' in 1643 at the start of the First English Civil War.[14] Archival evidence demonstrates that the pulpit cross had already been destroyed by 1641, however, and it is most likely that the pulpit was taken down in 1635, when this area of the Cathedral close was used as a masons' yard during renovation work on the cathedral.[15]

20th century

Between 1908 and 1910 a new structure was erected near the site of Paul's Cross, from funds provided by the will of the barrister

Doric column of Portland stone. The cathedral authorities' use of Richards's funds aroused a short-lived controversy.[16] In 1972 the monument was listed at Grade II.[17]

  • Sir Reginald Blomfield's Paul's Cross
    Sir Reginald Blomfield's Paul's Cross
  • The statue of Saint Paul by Sir Bertram Mackennal
    The statue of Saint Paul by Sir Bertram Mackennal
  • Plaque on the 20th-century Paul's Cross commemorating its precursor
    Plaque on the 20th-century Paul's Cross commemorating its precursor

References

  1. ISBN 9780948170065
    .
  2. ^ Blayney, Peter. "The Bookshop that Never Was, in Lena Cowen Orlin (ed.), Material London ca. 1600 (Philadelphia, 2000), p. 325".
  3. ISBN 978-0413295309
    .
  4. ISBN 9780521453950
    .
  5. doi:10.1017/S0261340900004975
    .
  6. ^ John Foxe (1887 republication), Book of Martyrs, Frederick Warne and Co, London and New York, pp. 160–61
  7. ISBN 9780199571765
    .
  8. ^ Earle, John (1628). Micocosmographie. London.
  9. ISBN 9780198723615
    .
  10. ISBN 0-8032-0923-1
    .
  11. ISBN 9780199571765
    .
  12. ISBN 0719054494
    .
  13. ISBN 9783030772666
    .
  14. ^ History of St Paul's Cathedral (1658), p. 134
  15. ^ Morrissey, Politics and the Paul's Cross Sermons, 1558-164 2, p. 34.
  16. ^ Ward-Jackson, Philip (2003). Public Sculpture of the City of London. Public Sculpture of Britain. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. pp. 384–6.
  17. ^ Historic England. "St Paul's Cross (1194637)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 25 October 2014.

External links

  • St Paul's Cross – Britannia.com
  • E. Beresford Chancellor's St. Paul's Cathedral (1925)
  • Benjamin Vincent's A Dictionary of Dates, London 1863

51°30′51″N 0°05′52″W / 51.5142°N 0.0978°W / 51.5142; -0.0978

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